On May 28, 1998, at exactly 3:15 PM Pakistan Standard Time, the Ras Koh hills of Balochistan turned white. Five nuclear devices detonated simultaneously inside a single mountain, sending a seismic wave measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale across the earth. A team of 150 scientists and engineers had worked in 53-degree Celsius heat for eight straight days to reach that moment. When PAEC Chairman Dr Ishfaq Ahmad radioed the result back to Islamabad, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the nation: today, we have settled a score. Twenty-eight years later, the programme that produced those six detonations has grown into one of the most sophisticated nuclear weapons architectures on earth, and on this Youm-e-Takbeer, it deserves to be understood in full.
What Bhutto Started in Grief, Pakistan Finished in Defiance
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gathered Pakistan’s top scientists at Multan on January 24, 1972, six weeks after the fall of Dhaka, and gave them a single instruction: build the bomb. Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan returned from the Netherlands in 1975 carrying centrifuge designs from the URENCO consortium, and founded the Engineering Research Laboratories in Kahuta in 1976, giving Pakistan a uranium enrichment path that ran parallel to PAEC’s plutonium programme under Munir Ahmad Khan. By 1978 Pakistan had produced enriched uranium. By 1983 PAEC had completed its first successful cold test of a nuclear device. Washington responded with the Pressler Amendment in 1990, freezing $1.4 billion in military assistance and confiscating F-16 aircraft Pakistan had already paid for. Pakistan redirected every dollar of that pressure into a ballistic missile programme that delivered greater strategic reach than those aircraft could ever have provided. Every sanction produced a more capable and more self-sufficient programme than existed before it was imposed.
The Architecture of Invincibility
The six detonations at Chagai were a beginning, not an endpoint. What Pakistan has built across twenty-eight years is a full nuclear triad covering land, air and sea, operating under the National Command Authority and Strategic Plans Division, delivering destructive capability at three tiers, strategic, operational and tactical, across ranges from zero metres to 2,750 kilometres.
On land, six operational solid-fuel road-mobile ballistic missile systems give Pakistan coverage across the full spectrum of nuclear scenarios: the short-range Abdali at 180 kilometres, Ghaznavi at 300 kilometres, Shaheen-I at 750 kilometres and the tactical Nasr at 60 to 70 kilometres, alongside the medium-range Ghauri at 1,250 kilometres and Shaheen-II at up to 2,000 kilometres. The Shaheen-III, displayed at the 2024 Pakistan Day Parade and carried on an eight-axle transporter erector launcher, extends Pakistan’s reach to 2,750 kilometres, covering the entirety of India including its southernmost tip and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Ababeel, a three-stage solid-fuel missile derived from the Shaheen-III airframe with a range of 2,200 kilometres, will give Pakistan its first Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle capability, allowing a single missile to deliver independently guided warheads against several targets simultaneously, specifically designed to defeat India’s growing ballistic missile defence environment.
New Weapons, New Dimensions
In the air, Mirage III and V aircraft carry the Ra’ad I and II air-launched cruise missiles at ranges between 350 and 600 kilometres, while the Taimoor ALCM, tested for the first time from a Mirage III on January 3, 2026, flies terrain-hugging at 150 metres altitude across 600 kilometres, a low-observable profile specifically designed to defeat modern radar and air defence interception systems. The JF-17 Block III, photographed carrying the Ra’ad in 2023, is expected to assume the nuclear delivery role as Mirage squadrons retire, with at least three Mirage squadrons scheduled to stand down by 2027.
At sea, Pakistan has established a sea-based nuclear capability through the Babur-3 submarine-launched cruise missile, tested twice from an underwater mobile platform in 2017 and 2018, with the Hangor-class AIP submarines now entering service to eventually provide a dedicated survivable nuclear-armed platform operating from the depths of the Arabian Sea. In August 2025, Pakistan established the Army Rocket Force Command, a new three-star-led organisation modelled on China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, controlling all conventional rockets and missiles including the Fatah series and future hypersonic systems, operating separately from the Strategic Plans Division’s nuclear forces and providing an additional deterrence layer between conventional operations and nuclear employment.
The Doctrine India Cannot Outmanoeuvre
India’s Cold Start Doctrine was constructed around a single assumption: that rapid limited conventional strikes could inflict punishment on Pakistan below the nuclear threshold before international intervention. The Nasr tactical missile, deployed in regimental batteries directly opposite Indian armoured formations and carrying a low-yield warhead of approximately 12 kilotons, was built to answer that assumption at the precise moment and location Cold Start requires space to operate. General Kidwai described these systems as weapons of peace, crediting them with neutralising India’s most sophisticated conventional military strategy before it could be executed.
Pakistan’s Fatah-IV ground-launched cruise missile, first tested in September 2025 at a range of 750 kilometres, adds a new layer of precision strike capability between the tactical and operational tiers, demonstrating that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons architecture continues to evolve and expand rather than standing still.
Bhutto told his scientists in 1972 that Pakistan would eat grass if it had to. Pakistan never ate grass. What it built instead, across twenty-eight years of sanctions, surveillance and sustained external pressure, is a weapons system covering every corner of India at three tiers of destructive yield, from battlefield nuclear responses to city-level strategic strikes, from aircraft flying below radar to submarines hiding beneath the Arabian Sea. On this Youm-e-Takbeer, that is the legacy worth celebrating.
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